So, I have the game through steam, and while I haven't played it for some months, I just now got back and saw there was a patch. Thought "why not?" and downloaded, but since I've moved my game to C:/Dominions (due to it running more stable there) I had to do a full reinstall.

Now when I start the game, as soon as I click anything, the menus to the left disappears. After a bit of googling it seems this is the copy-protection.

I tried deleting the "key" file in the folder to let steam download it again, to no success - the problem remains.

Anyone know why this happens? I have the game legit, and I've never posted the cd-key anywhere (in fact up until now I barely knew there was one) or copied the game anywhere else.

Okay, so things just got even weirder. I went to my desktop to play Dom instead (my issues so far was on my laptop), since I've got an older copy installed that that I know exists. I thought. Because now copy-protection sets in there too? I haven't even started Steam, the game is installed at C:/Dominions, and I've never had issues there before, having several saved games that I've played for 100+ turns.

And I haven't patched the game there, didn't even have steam running at the time of playing! How would that even work, on a technical level? This is going from slightly annoying to truly frustrating. I have such a Dom craving! What to do?